4 ideas
Hindus come to Banaras to die because the city is held to grant moksha, liberation from rebirth, to anyone who dies within its bounds, whatever their caste or deeds. Tradition holds that Shiva himself whispers the taraka, the 'crossing' mantra, into the ear of the dying. At Manikarnika ghat, the cremation pyres are said never to go out, and the city runs hospices where the old wait to die there.
A tirtha is literally a river crossing, and sacred places are understood as fords where the boundary between the human and divine shores is thin enough to cross. Banaras is the supreme tirtha, so pilgrimage there is framed as transit toward liberation rather than a visit to a shrine. The Ganges, which turns to flow north toward its Himalayan source as it passes the city, reinforces this reading of the site as a crossing point.
Banaras's major temples were repeatedly razed, including the Vishvanatha temple, which Aurangzeb replaced with a mosque, yet the city's sanctity was never broken. Holiness was located in the land itself, the linga, the tank and the river, so worship relocated, rebuilt nearby or continued at the site. A sacred place that does not depend on architecture can survive the destruction of all its monuments.
Banaras is ritually constructed as a microcosm: all of India's pilgrimage places, rivers and deities are said to be present inside it. A pilgrim can therefore reach the whole sacred landscape within the city's limits. The Panchakroshi yatra, a roughly fifty-mile circumambulation of the city's boundary, enacts this idea by marking Kashi as a bounded, complete cosmos, which tradition says Shiva holds on his trident above the dissolution of the world.